How to be Compassionate
If you’ve read this newsletter or practiced meditation with the Ten Percent Happier app, you’ve doubtless heard numerous teachers talk about the importance of compassion. But how do you actually develop it?
My colleagues and I have studied compassion extensively, in what may seem like a surprising context: the workplace. Work environments can make it hard to balance taking decisive action with acting with humanity and care. Yet the payoff for doing so is high: according to our research with 2000 global leaders across 15 industries, when leaders are able to do hard things in a human way, employee job satisfaction increases by 86%, job performance increases by 20%, and burnout decreases by 64%.
In our research, we worked to uncover what compassion really looks like in action, what skills one would need to develop it. We identified four such skills: presence, courage, candor, and transparency. When practiced together and in this order, these four skills create a virtuous cycle that we call the Wise Compassion Flywheel. Here’s how it works.
1. Caring Presence: Be here now
When we are present, we are in the moment, giving the people around us our full attention. Unfortunately, that is not our default state. We are wired to be distracted and prone to act on autopilot with ingrained behaviors. As readers of this newsletter know, mindfulness is a useful way to counter this tendency, becoming more present with what is happening right now versus being distracted. Mindfulness also helps us to be present with ourselves, recognizing any traps that might get in our way, and to be present with others to tune in to what they are expressing but may or may not be saying. That foundation enables us to incorporate compassion into our interaction, and remember that the person in front of us deserves our respect, attention, care, and curiosity.
2. Caring Courage: Courage over comfort
Once we are present, we can choose courage over comfort. As human beings, we’re hardwired to embrace certainty and safety and to avoid danger and discomfort. In fact, sometimes we’ll do nearly everything we can to convince ourselves that staying in our comfort zone is the best thing to do. Yet compassion requires us to open up to others, to consider the difficult feelings we and they may be having. And that requires courage. We might still experience fear about an uncomfortable interaction or the delivery of negative news, but we find the inner strength to overcome the fear and still engage in difficult situations with others. Courage is the willingness to move out of our comfort zones. When we open ourselves up to difficult emotions – our own or others – and not run away from them, the chance for human connection blossoms.
3. Caring Candor: Direct is faster
Having checked in with what is happening for you and for the other person, and having summoned up the courage to have a potentially difficult interaction, the third step is interacting with caring candor. This means being direct and straightforward, and it is always the fastest and most efficient way to engage in a conversation. Candor on its own can easily come across as brutal honesty, simply stating our unfiltered opinions. But with caring candor, you deliver the message in the most kind and direct way, which allows for the other person to receive it quickly and for the real conversation to begin. Caring candor is not a free pass to speak your mind with all the confusion that happens in a heated moment. It means being direct and decisive while also remaining authentically open to other people’s perspectives and demonstrating care for their emotions and well-being.
4. Caring Transparency: Clarity is kindness
Finally, caring transparency means getting ideas and thoughts out in the open—to make the invisible visible. It means being open and honest about what is on our minds and in our hearts. We strip away the power that often comes with knowledge and even the playing field. As a result, people know where they stand and what comes next. Transparency is distinct from candor in that you can be candid and still conceal information. When you are transparent, people know what is on your mind. And when you add caring to transparency, people also know what is in your heart.
When we start the journey towards greater compassion, using these four steps as our guide, we are present in our interactions with others, and we have the courage to show up with candor and transparency. And when we show up in this way, we make it possible for others to show up with presence, courage, candor, and transparency too. Over time, this compassionate way of being becomes our default, our expectation, the rule versus the exception.
Rasmus Hougaard is a meditation and mindfulness expert who has studied with the Dalai Lama. He is the CEO of Potential Project, which helps organizations to build more human and compassionate workplaces. The above is adapted from his most recent book, Compassionate Leadership: How to Do Hard Things in a Human Way by Harvard Business Review Press.
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Get Outside the Little Cave of Your Brain
Editor's Note: Poet and author Ross Gay was a recent guest on the Ten Percent Happier podcast, and spoke with Dan about the power of joy, delight, and connection. Gay recently released a new collection of essays, The Book of (More) Delights. This was a continuation of a project that began when he decided to spend a year writing out moments of delight throughout the day. He explains the difference between delight and joy:
“I think delight is occasional. Delight is the hummingbird buzzing by your ear. Whoa! That's delight. …Joy is something that is always present, and it's available to us, and you kind of enter it, or it finds you. But it doesn't feel like it requires an occasion… I think of joy as our fundamental connection.”
He goes on to describe how delight can be contagious and provide opportunities for connection.
“This sort of contagion of moods is a real thing—our own moods and other people's moods... I'm not just delighted inside of the little cave of my brain. I'm delighted because I'm observing things outside of the little cave of my brain. And often those things are like these instances of sweetness. It's the witnessing of a kind of sweetness outside of myself…People are so inclined after they hear about this, they're like, ‘After I read your book, I did that for a little bit.… I talk to my kid and I ask what's delighting them.’ And it is my experience that when people are like, ‘yo, this is what I love’, that I'm inclined to be like, ‘oh yeah, what do I love?’.”
Another key element and outcome of this practice has been strengthening a sense of curiosity. Gay shared a conversation he had with Sharon Salzberg:
“I was talking with Sharon Salzberg a few days ago, and she said something along the lines of, ‘Despair is the result of knowing everything.’ But curiosity, wondering about how it's going to go, is something else... Not knowing how it's going to go might provoke all kinds of feelings. But when I feel curiosity, it invites a sense of, ‘okay, well, I guess I should check. I guess I should see.’ In the smallest way, we can all relate to this in our relationships. If I just know how a conversation is going to go, why am I going to have it? As opposed to being like, ‘well, I wonder how it's going to go. I guess I better fess up to the fact that I don't actually know everything about this other person.”
This curiosity and connection can also help us be with the inevitable pain of change, together. Gay says:
One of the ways that I think of joy is something that isn't separate from or an alternative to sorrow, but it's something that actually emerges from sorrow. Joy doesn't actually exist absent of sorrow. And one of the expressions of joy is the way that we help each other, how we carry each other through our sorrows. It's a kind of ground that things change—everything we love is going to be gone. Joy is as likely to make you weep as it is to make you dance—neither of which are more or less evidence of joy. But it does feel like joy comes from both, or joy might make you want to do both.
Check out the full interview in the app or wherever you listen to podcasts.
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Awareness is a capacity of the human mind. As we ordinarily understand it, it’s the ability to directly know and to perceive, sense, feel, or be cognizant of experience. We might think of awareness simply as the state of being conscious of something.
Every sentient being is aware, in this sense of the word. But human beings (and, who knows, maybe some animals) also have an additional capacity: to be aware of awareness, or aware that they are aware.
And this is where it gets interesting, because the “awareness of awareness” has been a focus of meditation for hundreds of years.
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The problem is, in today’s concrete jungle, we’re stressed out not by lions but by traffic jams, overflowing inboxes, and an insufficient number of Instagram likes. All of which our bodies treat as emergencies, What can we do about that?